1815 house holds a surprise

Collector Jacques Valiquette has filled it with mid-20th century furniture by famous designers

The oldest house in Georgeville, built by Joshua Copp, has a neo-classical facade with multi-paned windows and a large fanlight over the front door.

Photograph by: Helga Loverseed
, The Gazette

The approach to George-ville is heralded by a handful of early 19th-century homes built by the first settlers, some of whom came from New England. These houses, with their neo-classical facades sporting multi-paned windows and fanlights above pillared doorways, make this village on the shores of Lake Memphremagog one of the prettiest in the Eastern Townships.

Jacques Valiquette's house is the oldest of the group. It was built in 1815 by one Joshua Copp, whose father, Moses, founder of Georgeville, arrived not long after the American Revolution. When Valiquette, a Montreal dentist, bought his home in 2000, it was known as the Steele House. At that time, it belonged to Joan Murray (née Steele), whose husband was descended from William Murray, owner of the Beaver Line, a shipping company. (It became part of Canadian Pacific in 1902.) Joan, a noted silversmith, lived for a long time in Dunkeld, the Murrays' farm, now owned by actor Donald Sutherland.

Given the weight of all that history, it comes as a surprise to walk inside Valiquette's house to find it filled with designer furniture from the 1950s and '60s. Somehow you expect the place to be groaning with antiques. He does indeed have a few of those as well and some nautical memorabilia inherited from Mrs. Murray.

"When I bought the house, the arrangement was that Mrs. Murray could continue to live here," explained Valiquette. "I got along well with her and I think she looked on me as a kind of adopted son. After she died in 2005, I was lucky enough to become the custodian of the William Murray Collection."

Most of the collection comprises documents, ships' models and oil paintings that came from the Beaver Line - an era when steam was beginning to replace sail. There are so many fascinating objects, in fact, that this summer Valiquette has decided to put together a small exhibition in one of his outbuildings, open to the public.

Valiquette's real passion however, is modern design. Three years ago, he took over the house full time and finished furnishing it with the pieces that he loves. There was a lot of space to fill. From the front, the house looks small, but that is the original settler home and it extends far into the back of his garden, embracing what used to be a large shed (now Valiquette's kitchen) and a "granny flat" built by Mrs. Murray, when her husband became confined to a wheelchair. The house is now "at least" 3,000 sq. ft., with nine rooms, three bedrooms, two bathrooms and two powder rooms.

The hub of the house is the kitchen, a mad jumble of old artifacts hanging from the ceiling and along the walls - wooden duck decoys, lamps with Tiffany-style shades, clocks, baskets, black-and-white photographs of the steamers that used to ply Lake Memphremagog, a child's scooter with an owl ornament perched on top, even an original penny-farthing bicycle. The list goes on.

"I've been a serious collector for years," explained Valiquette, "but I've gone through different phases. At one point I was into old French-Canadian armoires and after that Art Deco. What I've done in this house is mix the modern stuff with whatever antiques were remaining."

The original pioneer kitchen is reached by way of a narrow staircase, which corkscrews downward into a light-filled room glistening with glass and burnished wood. Several tall, narrow display cases are crammed with old glass bottles that Valiquette has collected, some on diving expeditions into Lake Memphremagog.

In the middle of the room is a 1950s dining table with a glass top and wrought iron legs. Two smaller tables in similar style are placed along one wall. Along another wall is the (still working) fireplace built back in the early 1800s, complete with hanging cooking irons. Around the dining table is a set of chairs with wrought iron legs. The seats are made of slatted wood, which matches the hardwood floors. In the far corner is a 1940s moulded plywood chair, the work of designer Charles Eames.

The upstairs living room and dining room exude elegance and harmony. They too are furnished with modern furniture and, while today they would be classified as "vintage," they could hardly be described as antiques.

"Years ago, when I bought this furniture, I had a feeling it would eventually become collectors' pieces," said Valiquette. "I was probably a bit unusual, because back in the Sixties, most people didn't really think of it as being "designer" furniture. If they bought teak furniture or Danish furniture, they wouldn't connect it, for example, with Hans Wegner." (Wegner was a famous Scandinavian cabinetmaker.)

Valiquette's collection includes furnishings by many leading designers of the early to mid-20th century - the aforementioned Charles Eames, George Nelson (one of the founding fathers of American modernism), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (best known for his 1929 Barcelona Chair). One of Valiquette's pieces is a Wassily tubular steel chair designed by Marcel Breuer, one of the founding members of the Bauhaus movement.

Valiquette's dining room has grey walls and white wood trim around the windows. On the hardwood floor is a burgundy-and-beige Oriental rug - the perfect setting for the black lacquer dining table (L6 by Le Corbusier) and Mario Bellini Cab chairs. Underneath two of the multi-paned windows is a 1950s Kofod-Larsen teak sideboard.

The living room is similarly adorned with an Oriental rug and black furniture - two Moroso easy chairs with wide armrests and a crescent-shaped sitting space, as well as a couple of tub chairs by Philippe Starck (best known these days for his minimalist hotel designs). Between the tub chairs sits a boxy metal armchair with an ostrich leather cover and in the corner, an Edwardian cabinet that once belonged to Walter Stanley Munro, the 18th prime minister of Newfoundland, before it became part of Canada.

The upper portion of the cabinet has glass-fronted doors. The lower part is a chest of drawers, but the top layer is false and flips out to reveal a desktop - a rather ingenious way to hide important documents and paperwork.

Valiquette's bedroom is a dazzling blend of psychedelic orange and postbox red with dashes of black from a couple of leather chairs - one a lounge chair (and ottoman) named the Ari by Arne Norell, a Swedish designer from the 1960s. A red-lacquered sideboard and chest of drawers is the work of Raymond Loewy, a Parisian who designed, among other things, the Shell logo, the 1940s Lucky Strike cigarette packet and the original cast iron le Creuset cooking pots.

When asked how he has become such an expert on mid-century design, Valiquette explains that he has "developed knowledge through acquiring."

"I research of course, but the more you acquire, the more you learn. I started collecting seriously in the 1960s. I'm particularly fond of this period, because it's a time when I was young and my furniture fills me with a certain nostalgia."

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